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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!news.uoknor.edu!ns1.nodak.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.clark.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!uknet!festival!edcogsci!richard From: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) Subject: a.out files Message-ID: <CqA5BD.Cvn@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh Date: Mon, 23 May 1994 23:59:36 GMT Lines: 35 A few months ago, Jeff Dalton and I produced a port of Franz Lisp to NetBSD 0.9. I've just been trying to get it to run under FreeBSD 1.1. We also did a port of AKCL 1.615. First the good news: the Franz NetBSD binary works, with only one minor change. The script "nld", which just runs /usr/bin/ld, needs to be changed to add the flags "-Bstatic" and "-x". Probably if you recompile it you won't need the -x flag (maybe). AKCL appears to work except for loading C code (it uses its own code for loading compiled Lisp rather than ld -A). Both Franz and AKCL are available by anonymous ftp from macbeth.cogsci.ed.ac.uk. Now a minor flame: if you're going to change the a.out format every few months, *please* pay more attention to backward compatibility in ld. -A should imply -Bstatic. The "c" and "p" arguments to -d are irrelevant if -Bstatic is used, and shouldn't be required (I have no idea why AKCL uses -d, but there's no need to break it). Sun's ld doesn't have these problems. Finally, could someone please explain the various different a.out formats in NetBSD and FreeBSD? I used to think this was complicated enough on the VAX in 1983, but a.out.h is now completely beyond me. Oh, and please tell me that the last sentence of the "BUGS" section in the a.out man page is a joke. -- Richard -- Richard Tobin, HCRC, Edinburgh University R.Tobin@ed.ac.uk "Your monkey has got it right, sir." - HHGTTG